Tattersby

The Folly: third arc

Just when the three investigators are feeling close to a breakthrough, de Clieux having established a path to the Celtic daughter, and she beginning to reveal those things unknown to history, to share her language and memories…

A mid-air collision between two planes brings three new spirits to the vicinity. Much to the surprise of the host and the guest, the spirits seem making themselves vocal, though these ought not to have been captured within the Folly’s marble-decorated chimneypiece. One is the playful and adulterous Lady Gimple; one, the husband of Mrs. Tattersby, the Spiritualist fellowship’s president…and one, Tattersby’s most vengeful rival in love.

Complicating the matter is a houseguest from America, Miss Harvey, a woman disturbingly self-aware of her mediumship.

I feel I would have been remiss in my duties, as Secretary of Phenomena, not to have called this to your attention. It was on account of your having a houseguest, that (as I recall) you had written to postpone our walking party. I found the letter and read it through twice, to make certain of the particulars. Indeed, the weather seems (here, I should like to make a pun between incline and inclement, and can’t seem to do it) to forbid our climbing Wisham’s Hill. Our glasses are unlikely to descry anything promising about the lay of the land, in this pernicious fog. Perhaps, if Miss Harvey cannot walk any distance, she will enjoy reading my notes, assembled thus far, on the False St. Crispin’s. She is one of us?

Swallowtail

(three)

You’ve never sat, doing your work

…if you had been me, on a stool upstairs

Made dumb by the green walls of Lippard’s laboratory

Looking down, as directed, through the lens

at the wing he’d razored along the vein

Some of the colors are not pigments, you know

Only reflections of light

He hated girls to be romantic

Wanted me in a purely clinical sense

To pin the specimen, wearing magnifying goggles

With the scalpel’s point, slice the abdomen

I wouldn’t love the butterfly and make a life for it in fancy

Like a woman

I would understand

It was a creature of component parts

M. de Clieux, Miss Harvey says

I waited for him on the blanket

With the box lunch and my pocket sketchbook

You’ve never sat, doing your work…

And felt uprising mark you

A flying squadron circle you, the enemy

Hem you round, knock you in the eye

Drop into your tea, buzz with a chill obscenity

Fall into your bodice

De Clieux feels this living woman, matter of fact in madness

Infects him, makes his intimate adulation of a ghost

as menacing as the insurgent swallowtail

The Lay of the Land

(four)

‘I imagine…I will not say admit…the possibility of cordial relations—

You see what he’s done here.’

The tenant of Wisham’s Hill Cottage

has got the field gate closed to traffic

For good, more or less…for the time being

Put a sinister trip-wire run through a boundary stone

‘He ought not to have made that hole,’ Mrs. Tattersby,

as she braces her rabbit-gun and takes a bead

Remarks acerbically to the host

‘That post is in charge of the Council.’

The spaniel has got herself over

At the loss of a tuft of hair

The terrier is perched with its paws up

And Dougal says, through gritted teeth

‘Look there!’

The local youth are pleased to trespass

Couldn’t care

There goes a lad and his girl with their cameras

The black, flattened tillage spans a swath so much larger

Than the bodies of two small planes

Metal parts thrust up

scrubbed shining by the rains

And Dougal’s face is red with a much-resented gallantry

He thinks there must be parts of Tattersby

Burned in the earth

Knows these young rapscallions think so too, and hope it

Taking photographs, trying to carry things away

And the wife can stand like that, and scorn him

‘We’d arranged our business before all this, Mr. Inskip. We shan’t be looking

that direction.’

Familiar

(five)

All these ordinary things are giving way

Times of late, like the dead wrapped in their winding sheets

Familiar in outline still

But disintegrating into melt and worm beneath

He feels infected with the guest’s unhappy mood

Uses the word, not having spoken with de Clieux

He thinks the time is now to broach disturbance

The time is near…the time grown urgent

He gazes at the sky to hold this in

‘They’re loose,’ he murmurs

Faithful Inskip won’t go home

His housekeeper is waving far below

A duster like a signal-flag, up and down

Her smock a sack of ticking in the door frame

‘Bugger the woman,’ he shockingly says

But too, under his breath, and moves

Again without manners, brusquely pushing through

to catch Mrs. Tattersby

And though the host would have said she never will

She needs poor Dougal’s help

She gives a scream

A shallow skin of humus girds the summit

A clayey baste of tufted grass and pine straw

Here hundreds of white butterflies or moths

Have risen and still rise

Her face cannot be seen

Her garments seethe

As Lightning Might

(six)

Their leader is not unwell. No, not harmed.

Please leave off, dear.

Curious, no more. A nuisance.

Please don’t trouble.

All over now.

When she’d shaken out her jacket

One flew a spiral

And died in the fire

Its wings by then had…

…caked away, he somehow thinks

As a butterfly’s broken will do

The scales, would it be the scales

He could ask and she would tell

He wants to leave Miss Harvey…any house that holds her

At this moment, and not hate her

For scintillating so

‘It’s me,’ she says. ‘It’s me, being here. They know.’

De Clieux, pushing currents against the thickness

Tells himself it’s air we blunder through

Air is not nothing

We breathe lethargy and move like swimmers

This countryside this moment pulling down the clouds

Strikes him thus, as lightning might

Our eyes can’t see, but it will burst its bounds

He had wanted an aimless walk alone

He asks his friend, who has trailed behind

To prow away the silence with chatter

Explain what it was about the chapel

The false St. Crispin’s

‘Well, you know. We have records to the twelfth century.

So it had been assumed there was only one. Of course, that would be

typically the way of it…fire, or invasion, or plague, would

rend to ruin, make abandoned, the old edifice

They would rebuild on the same spot

De Clieux, if you’ll climb with me to the top

Of Wisham’s Hill, we’ll arrive just at dusk

I believe it’s safe.’

Dougal Inskip’s Lonely Vigil

(seven)

When she had been Fiona Medwin

Long about the jaw, but fair enough to a man

Content to break even on a steady-goer

No desire for a flash in the pan

Women, though, Dougal says to himself

Flash will get them, even the sensible ones

Ought she to burn a torch for Tattersby

Useless git to let a butterfly flatter him

…Lady Gimple, not a proper title either

Always the fly-boys with that one

(by reputation)

He has trodden the beckoning path

Wisham’s Hill Cottage to the Folly’s gate

He has no pretext for passing beyond

She won’t thole it, won’t take it as a caring friend’s

Solicitude

Tear another strip, more like…say to him again, not

Thank you, dear (you are so good to me)

But, Dougal, are you mad?

And at once, the light goes out

‘You must be mad, I swear you are!

Look at you, Mr. Inskip, preening on the inside!

Did she call you Dougal, you poor lamb? How starved you are!

And what a meagre banquet the old girl provides.

How dare you, while we’re at it, say my title’s not a proper one?

Because poor Reggie got his for flying a blimp over the channel?

Ah, poor Reggie! He has truly gone down to the sea.

We’ll never know if his soul washes up on some Froggie beach.’

Light laughter. Dougal, meanwhile, struggles,

bending double, dancing foot to foot.

She has taken impish hands from his eyes,

And got him by the arms…round the ankles.

He is painfully aware he looks a fool,

Wrestling the invisible.

At last he dares to whisper, ‘Lady Gimple…’

Edwytha’s Plait

(eight)

Terror, when it comes, warms the night

Fallen close and hard of breath

like a parachute’s muffling silk and chill

Night

Borne opaque the face of pity

Mirrored in the watcher’s eye

The plain below

Sinking to the cataract

Emerging hidden under rock

Mimicking Edwytha’s plait

The waters keen

And he has never known this name

For since the Celtic daughter’s hour

They have not called it so

They throng

Crania lift hollow sockets, smile

Sadly aware

They are death’s heads void of nuance

Smile of all the world’s news

A rational man, de Clieux tells his companion

Would call this fog

Have you really left your bed to join me?

Miss Harvey says, for this time

That was my great disappointment…it has been

So many, but Edwytha does not come

When the sun was high yet, before the warning clouds

Before the settlling mists had veiled her iron locks

You’d seen her forged there, giantess laid low

Long ribboned tresses bound in woven stone

Edwytha’s resting place, our spirit home

I, monsieur, too much a goddess from the cradle

Not to dream of honour, how I’d fly

The day I’d won a guardian’s grave

And mounted to the sky

The council first resolved

To bargain with our poverty of gold

Yea, this, we give in tribute, Romans!

All we have

My brothers, each with ceremony draws the silver brooch

From his cloak, and from his hair

Ceremony

That for this solemnity our enemy suppose

We yield before their potent Jupiter

We bury our own

Not Wanted Here

(nine)

Awkward. He reminds himself he’d said it to the host

Not long ago. He’d meant Fiona. Tattersby. And the awkwardness was

Sex. Well, but…the guest says, temporizing. In this dense fog,

strolling with somnambulant, cautious footing, he feels the sheen of mist

like Lady Gimple’s atomizer. When he’d been her tutor,

she’d sprayed him with her Joy, making sticky the Chaucer, and smiling…laughing,

he must say, to see his eyes water. But what had been the notion…

It was this. That as the leaden pull of breakers, at the seaside, and the salt air,

make one feel not alone—but party to the wailing drowned,

he frets these spirits may have heard

A thought

No, he says aloud for their sake. I impute nothing. The French are different

And Miss Harvey. She, of course, is an American.

But, on the prudent side, I am not wanted here.

A ring shapes itself in parting obscurity

A gong-like train’s whistle

About that, where it seems to hit the scale

Shows teasing black, a dream of standing stones

Else a funhouse mirage

Of Dougal’s boundary post, reduplicated

Not his, of course, a borough feature

Meant to stand as sentinel, for public order

A speaking voice, he cannot fear it

And yet uncertain that he hears it

‘Squier, com neer, if it your wille be,

And sey somwhat of love; for, certes, ye

Connen theron as muche as any man.’

Roguish laughter.

We haven’t met

You and I, my scholarly predecessor.

Pre-deceased, think of that!

Poor bugger’s heart snuffed like ash.

Reggie! Dear old intrepid Reggie, him, we shan’t forget!

Falsetto: I call, and my lover answers not

Ha, ha!

Tattersby, chained on a spit, crisped to a cinder.

Inskip, daft fool! You’re for it now, lad!

Thou pair of captives, ye who live

And the hecatomb of my lady Lucille’s dead

Roscoe Bevington

(ten)

I feel cheated. Yes, cheated, in a profound and unexpected way

You won’t like crediting Roscoe Bevington with profundity

Not least because, educated as you’ve been

You no doubt cherish philosophy as franchise

Don’t much take to it, a wrong’un like myself

Waxing Aristotelian on the theme of man’s demise

I missed the war. As, of course, did you…ergo, sirrah, you understand me

When I say those boys of Kitchener’s brigade

Had the easier time of it

How I’d have thrived as a flying ace

What reward for ramming Tattersby mid-air

What medal pinned upon my breast?

Or such as filled my casket

His precious Tiger Moth, you know

Ha, ha! That also his unimaginative pet name for Lucille

Handy little aviatrix, our Lady Gimple

Now, I am a rather blunt-looking chap

Not one of your equine aristocracy

Makes one cynical of one’s elders, a bit

This inconstant family visage

And what is my brother Anselm today? A plodder

Embalmed behind a company desk

You don’t know, do you…you can’t tell me, my young squire

If he sent his man Walker in the dear old Chickadee

to carry it up to Morpeth

I mean that neatly severed hand of mine

The papers were all so kind as to mention

Awful Rivalry

(eleven)

The extraordinary freedom!

I refer to taking matters of despatch into one’s own hands.

I had been inclined, even I, to stick to rules, you know. Embarrassing

the name of Bevington not done.

(As though this were a thing of real concern.)

I bore the insults. Wavered, I tell you

On the brink of feeling

Titles, after all, must find each other out…

Here what feels to the guest like the clutch of a hand

Chilling his forearm with such freezing immediacy

He fears he has been done an injury

How at this moment he could wish, to share this insight with his colleagues!